A former BioWare developer has shared his thoughts on where Mass Effect: Andromeda's facial animation may have gone wrong.

Of all Andromeda's successes and failures, its facial animation has dominated the public conversation. Concerns were initially raised by fans after the game's teaser trailers debuted last year, and since release the faces of Andromeda have become a full-blown meme machine.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The reality of the game's facial animation is that the quality is variable. Sometimes it gets it right, but often characters exhibit no expression whatsoever, or a grimace plucked straight from the uncanny valley.

Jonathan Cooper is now an animator for Naughty Dog on the Uncharted series, but took to Twitter to explain why this probably occurred and how animating a large-scale RPG works.

According to Cooper, a principal factor is scale. In comparison to linear games like Uncharted, "RPGs offer a magnitude more volume of content and importantly, player/story choice. It's simply a quantity vs quality tradeoff."

Many story-driven action games like The Last of Us, or more recently Horizon: Zero Dawn, make use of motion-capture tech to animate their scenes. Where there isn't the potential to encounter hundreds of speaking NPCs, and the script is of a reasonable size, this is a practical solution.

But in order to animate the dozens of hours of spoken dialogue in an open-world RPG, developers can't always use mo-cap, so "designers (not animators) sequence pre-created animations together - like DJs with samples and tracks."

Cooper was kind enough to share an image of the software used for the task.

Even when systematising the facial animation this way, there often isn't enough time for it all to be done manually, so developers work out which scenes are most likely to be seen by players and focus on those.

"The lowest quality scenes," however, "may not even be touched by hand. To cover this, an algorithm is used to generate a baseline quality sequence."

According to Cooper, "Andromeda seems to have lowered the quality of its base algorithm, resulting in the 'My face is tired' meme featuring nothing but lip-sync."

This situation, Cooper continues, is exacerbated by the increased prevalence of streaming and YouTubing, which spreads the most questionable content out to an enormous audience.

He goes on to suggest that BioWare may have intended to assemble the complete breadth of Andromeda's facial animation using sequences rather than an algorithm, but underestimated the size of the task.

What we're left with is Faces of Andromeda.

BioWare will undoubtedly be feeling stung by the whole incident, which has distracted audiences from Andromeda's merits. It's probable that in its next RPG, it will adopt a new approach to bring facial animation in line with its audience's ever-increasing expectations.